Walk Away, To Where?
I've watched several videos under the hashtag #WalkAway . Apparently, this is a movement of people who are leaving the Democratic Party in the wake of the irrational negativity coming from the left.
Some negativity is in order, but the incessant squealing from the Left about Trump's win is over the top.
The mass exodus from the left is not new. Millions have parted ways with the left when they realize that the movement is morally bankrupt. I love when people eye's open and they realize that the prejudices imparted on them in school are false.
Unfortunately, after watching several videos a question jumped into my mind: "To Where?"
Where are these people to go?
The Conservative Movement is as intellectually bankrupt as the left. Libertarians are on the margin and tend to be ineffectual. People who leave the left are cut out and ostracized by the friends and and are simply left wandering around with no support or direction.
I left the Democratic Party in the Carter Administration and have yet to see the GOP do anything that I really supported. There have been a few debt financed tax cuts, but Conservatives tend to push economic and political centralization.
The conservative movement has very little to offer the people who bravely walk away from their support structures on the left. Anyway, I think I will leave this post as an open question.
It is great that some people are walking away from the left. Conservatives have nothing to offer this world. So, where are these people to go?
I think what will happen is that a majority of them will just be independents, some will join the Greens, some will join the Libertarians. A very small percentage (mostly blue collar) will join the GOP. The effect of this will be that the Green party will become marginally less marginal, the LP will drift slightly to the left, and the GOP will adopt economic nationalism.
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I love your observation about economic nationalism.
What I am trying to point out, of course, is that Conservatives have a nasty habit of arguing in the negative.
The #WalkAway movement shows a people upset with the current negative tone of the Democrats. Conservatives fail to present these people with the positive argument that will turn these people into lovers of liberty.
To win converts to the side of liberty, one needs to show both the failures of statism while showing how liberty solves problems. Conservatives focus almost exclusively on the first part while failing to address the second part.
IMHO, Libertarians need to do a better job showing that liberty empowers the people. I had a post about economic nationalism. I don't have a picture for the post yet.
You're right. We need more people like Adam Kokesh. I was a confirmed political pessimist until I met him in person. Meeting Adam changed that completely. I became a believer in the future of freedom, not just the correctness of it. Freedom is an extremely attractive thing! If we can't sell it, it's the fault of the salesman, not the product.
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IMHO, the classical liberal argument was extremely positive. The US Founders and GOP of the 1800s were classical liberal.
The basic idea was that free people, with a great deal of work, could build successful communities. They often succeeded.
I truly believe that, if people encountered the positive argument behind liberty, they would not only #walkaway from the radical left, they would become strong advocates of liberty.
For some odd reason, conservatives fail to make that case.
There is some sort of strange pathology that compels conservatives to present arguments for liberty in the negative. We can see this in a discussion of the relation between individuals and communities.
The progressive argument is that individuals (who are fueled by greed) are in conflict with the collective good and that the collective must repress individuals.
Ayn Rand flipped this idea upside-down and would argue that the individual is in conflict with the collective.
These negative arguments simply mirror each other.
I see a symbiotic relation between people and their community. My observation is that a group of independently minded individuals make a strong community.
A group of people who are independently minded and who strive for self sufficiency end up making wonderful neighbors and they end up building great communities.
What happens when people start with a strong over bearing community is that the people become weak and start putting excessive demands on the community. The community weakens and sometimes fractures.
The arguments based on conflict lead in a negative direction.
The reason for that, I think, is that there are actually two conservative movements in this country: cultural conservatism and political conservatism. Political conservatism makes pro-freedom arguments very easy, because our deist founders, who were not only politically radical, but also religiously radical for their time, were the most pro-liberty group of leaders in history. Cultural conservatism makes the pro-freedom arguments more difficult, because while cultural conservatism does value liberty, it tends to emphasize cultural valued over freedom in itself. Now, they are willing to extend freedom to those they disagree with, but what they tend to emphasize is not how that freedom benefits them, but rather how it enables them to be seperate from those they dislike. Well, that's interpreted as hateful. And, in some cases, arguably, it is. Freedom means the freedom to not associate with people you don't like. But it's poor salesmanship to emphasize that aspect of it.
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There is multiple definitions for all of our terms. This is especially true of partisan terms as political parties reshape their definitions for each election.
The big questions that people must ask is: Is "conservatism" effective at advancing liberty. We have a 50 year track record showing that it is not effective.
If one wants to advance freedom; then one simply must take the poor track record or conservatism into account.
One also needs to look at the roots of ideologies. The common roots of all modern conservative movements is the conservative movement that happened in Britain in the 1830s which was based on the conservative movement that brought Napoleon to power.
Even though there are innumerable definitions of conservatism, people who love liberty have to concede that the roots of the movement are troubling.
The roots of it are complicated. People mean different things when they say conservative - sometimes actually opposite things in certain respects. There is a relationship to European conservatism, although I would argue there is a much stronger relationship to classical liberalism, given that what is "conserved" is a (mostly) classical liberal tradition. On top of that, the conservative movement is generally identified with the Republican party, but the Republican party, from the very start, was hardly "conservative" in the sense of being moderate in any way. Lincoln wasn't even shy about ripping up the constitution here and there to win his war.
So yeah. It's complicated.
I prefer to call myself a libertarian or a classical liberal, because I think those terms are much more clear and distinct. The problem with those terms is that the hardcore statists tend to like to drape themselves in those terms and invert their meaning (hence why we now have to clarify "classical" liberal, instead of just "liberal").
But my attitude towards the conservative movement is that over the last two decades, I've observed it moving in a more libertarian direction. I consider this to be a positive thing, and I cheerlead it. Now, they won't ever be identical to libertarians, but it is getting to the point where we have much more in common with them than not.
The 20th Century Motor Company springs to mind.
I wish there was a meme to show my emotions for this